After working in a web agency for years, my number 1 red flag that the project is going to go badly is the quality of their current website they’re hiring you to fix/replace.
If it’s solid but just a bit old or needs more features, you’re fine. But, if it’s crap, look out.
The quality or lack of is never down to the the people who built it (unless it was by the MD’s nephew or something), especially if the client blames them for it.
It just shows they can’t run a project properly and whatever you end up with will be just a slightly newer pile of crap. And they’ll slag you off to the next lot.
Number two red flag is if they say at any point “You tell us, you’re the experts!” This can be translated to, “We don’t know what we want but we’re going to reject whatever you say anyway.”
> Number two red flag is if they say at any point “You tell us, you’re the experts!” This can be translated to, “We don’t know what we want but we’re going to reject whatever you say anyway.”
I disagree with this being a red flag. That's exactly why I hired someone to build me a small website. It's not because I don't know HTML / CSS / JS; it's because I'm bad at (visual) design. I wanted someone who knows what they're doing to use their expertise and give me a good product.
That’s great, you know to hire an expert and let them get on with it.
The problems start when the client either can’t or won’t explain what they want, then gets upset that what you produce doesn’t match what’s in their heads. At that point they start trying to undo every decision and things go south rapidly.
One company I worked for had a great website. One of my coworkers worked on it as his baby and took great care of it. Rest of the software stack was a dumpster fire.
One other coworker came on board because they thought "no bad company would ever have a bad website". The guy who hired him left a week after he joined. One developer left every week for four weeks afterwards.
Website quality is a weak signal; I'd say if a website didn't have any errors or warnings in $BROWSER DevTools, or made a mention of not pasting JavaScript here or having an explicit "oh hey you're a developer we're hiring", then that's good. Otherwise keep asking questions.
If it’s solid but just a bit old or needs more features, you’re fine. But, if it’s crap, look out.
The quality or lack of is never down to the the people who built it (unless it was by the MD’s nephew or something), especially if the client blames them for it.
It just shows they can’t run a project properly and whatever you end up with will be just a slightly newer pile of crap. And they’ll slag you off to the next lot.
Number two red flag is if they say at any point “You tell us, you’re the experts!” This can be translated to, “We don’t know what we want but we’re going to reject whatever you say anyway.”